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D&D 5EGun Mages & Warjacks: Iron Kingdoms Coming to 5E
Privateer Press has announced that it's longstanding fantasy steampunk RPG and setting is coming to 5th Edition with Iron Kingdoms: Requiem.
Privateer Press has announced that it's longstanding fantasy steampunk RPG and setting is coming to 5th Edition with Iron Kingdoms: Requiem.
The Iron Kingdoms launched way back in 2001 with a trilogy of d20 System adventures for D&D 3E. Later came a campaign setting, monster book, miniatures game, and more. The RPG later evolved into a d6 system and the full Iron Kingdoms RPG.
This latest iteration, Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, is a new edition of the Iron Kingdoms RPG, powered by the 5E rules.
Delve into the award-winning world of the Iron Kingdoms with the latest edition of the Iron Kingdoms Role Playing Game from Privateer Press. Iron Kingdoms: Requiem combines this fantastic setting with the newest edition of the world’s most popular roleplaying game.
Your character can be a human, gobber, trollkin, Rhulic dwarf, ogrun, Iosan, or Nyss elf; and there are new classes such as gun mages, arcane mechanics, combat alchemists, and warcasters. Plus, of course, gets, spells, setting information, and a section on 'arcane technologies'.
However, that is a really strange name for the return - Iron Kingdoms: Requiem. Does it mean they think it will die or this is the end of the line for Iron Kingdoms? Is there a different definition or meaning for Requiem within the Iron Kingdoms universe?
However, that is a really strange name for the return - Iron Kingdoms: Requiem. Does it mean they think it will die or this is the end of the line for Iron Kingdoms? Is there a different definition or meaning for Requiem within the Iron Kingdoms universe?
My best bet is that it has something to do with this blurb among the announcement that describes the current state of the setting:
The Orgoth were driven from western Immoren more than four hundred years ago, but the decisions made during the rebellion still echo through the world. There are many strange legends from the last days of that war—tales of dark, mysterious allies who helped drive off the invaders. Some say it would have been impossible to defeat the Orgoth without this help, that the rebel leaders had to make dangerous deals with infernal powers. These tales have proven true, and the Iron Kingdoms have recently been irrevocably changed by the Claiming, an attempt by these infernal creatures to take the payment they have long been owed—an unfathomable number of souls.
However, that is a really strange name for the return - Iron Kingdoms: Requiem. Does it mean they think it will die or this is the end of the line for Iron Kingdoms? Is there a different definition or meaning for Requiem within the Iron Kingdoms universe?
They are in the process of blowing up the Iron Kingdoms setting over in the Warmachine wargame. One of the two human Gods that wasn't the Creator (possibly through her agents) made a deal with the Infernals (demons) so the humans could have magic and in doing save themselves from extinction at the hands of the Orgoth. There were two parts to this deal; the first involved feeding the Elven gods to the Infernals. Recently in the setting (and recently in real life, as in starting in about June 2019) the second part of the deal became due; the Infernals are now here to claim the souls of, from memory, a third of all the humans.
The 3e rules for PCs were a little unbalanced and a little "square peg in a round hole"; I hope the 5e rules will be better. On the other hand the 3e Monsternomicon was arguably the best monster manual produced for 3.X by anyone (although is non-comparable with the MM1 of course). It was full of interesting and memorable monsters with nice adventuring hooks to get involved with.
A lot of the reason for blowing up the Iron Kingdoms dates back to some poor decisions made over the past decade by Privateer Press - and to Games Workshop getting rid of their liability of a CEO and sorting themselves out about five years ago - I could go into details if anyone is interested.
On the other hand the 3e Monsternomicon was arguably the best monster manual produced for 3.X by anyone (although is non-comparable with the MM1 of course). It was full of interesting and memorable monsters with nice adventuring hooks to get involved with.
I remember it having top-tier fluff and world building info but less spectacular mechanics. I prefer the way IK does dragons over the basic color-coded D&D version as well, though the addition of layer stuff has edged 5e bosses in that direction.
I remember it having top-tier fluff and world building info but less spectacular mechanics. I prefer the way IK does dragons over the basic color-coded D&D version as well, though the addition of layer stuff has edged 5e bosses in that direction.
I'm not aware of any 3.X monster manual type book that did have spectacular mechanics (if anyone knows of one, please tell me). You'd more or less have to re-write the 3.X monster statblock format for that (and in the case of a number of monsters throw out the grappling rules and start over). The 5e structure is vastly improved that way - and they've been honing their design through the wargame, so I'm expecting more out of them this time.
I played the wargame for several years, and the background for the Iron Kingdoms is crazy detailed--Keith Baker on Eberron levels of thorough. There was a lot of love that went into this setting and its history. It got a bit stretched out for the wargame (when you have to have reasons for every faction to fight every other faction, but none of them can ever decisively win or lose), but the RPG filled in the non-military side of things admirably.
I'd always be up for more Iron Kingdoms stuff, but there are two big concerns I have. One is the "everything is about the Infernals now!" metaplot stinking up a vibrant and believable steampunk setting (very much not a fan of the post-Oblivion stuff, though that might be bias from what a terrible job was made of adding the faction to the wargame). The other is that D&D kind of needs a strict balance between PC's, and when it's fairly easy for PC's to have warjacks or warbeasts that are better at fighting than they are, that kind of goes out the window--and given how iconic they are, you can't really leave warlocks and warcasters out of the RPG.
A lot of the reason for blowing up the Iron Kingdoms dates back to some poor decisions made over the past decade by Privateer Press - and to Games Workshop getting rid of their liability of a CEO and sorting themselves out about five years ago - I could go into details if anyone is interested.
Sure, I'd be interested. I mostly picked up the two 3.5 Monsternomicons and then some cheap second hand early warmachine books for the world and faction flavor so I am not deeply plugged in to the last decade of their stuff or how GW is involved.
I'm not aware of any 3.X monster manual type book that did have spectacular mechanics (if anyone knows of one, please tell me). You'd more or less have to re-write the 3.X monster statblock format for that (and in the case of a number of monsters throw out the grappling rules and start over). The 5e structure is vastly improved that way - and they've been honing their design through the wargame, so I'm expecting more out of them this time.
My understanding is that Monster Manual V in 3.5 worked very hard on that end as a design goal and had a lot of mechanical things like an early 4e style bloodied mechanics that triggered when monsters lost half their hp to change the dynamics of the fight part way through. I eventually got it but have not gone through it in depth or used stuff from it. I mostly play 5e now.
A lot of the reason for blowing up the Iron Kingdoms dates back to some poor decisions made over the past decade by Privateer Press - and to Games Workshop getting rid of their liability of a CEO and sorting themselves out about five years ago - I could go into details if anyone is interested.
Please do. I play Warmachine and follow Privateer Press' going-ons, but fail to see the relation you propose between their business decisions and "blowing up" the IK.
Sure, I'd be interested. I mostly picked up the two 3.5 Monsternomicons and then some cheap second hand early warmachine books for the world and faction flavor so I am not deeply plugged in to the last decade of their stuff or how GW is involved.
I'm not Neonchamelon, but here's my take on what happened (spoilered for length)....
The second edition Warmachine wargame was ticking along nicely, but roundabout 2015 there's a bit of bloat building up (five or six differently named rules for "this gun fires fast", for example) and some infamously poorly balanced armies or lists (Legion of Everblight ignoring half the rules in the game, the agonising "skip a turn" experience of Major Victoria Haley, Lich Lord Asphyxious deleting half your infantry turn two with a weird interaction with Bile Thralls, the "miserable meat mountain" trollkin lists, etc), but overall it's in a fairly solid spot.
Bear in mind that this is when Games Workshop is just self destructing. At the time, it really did look that they would be out of business within a few years due to horribly short-sighted decisions based on the then-CEO wringing the company dry while readying his golden parachute. Most of the cult classic side games (Necromunda, Blood Bowl, Epic, Battlefleet Gothic) had been canned, 40K was a hideously unbalanced mess where the new editions were coming fast to push new model types like aircraft, Warhammer Fantasy was in a steep decline after the rules had been changed to push huge slabs of infantry bumping into each other and then not moving, as well as gigantic centrepiece war machines and monsters (the End Times would come soon, along with Age of Sigmar's amazingly botched launch--though AoS has really picked itself up since then), prices were rising, there were some publicity disasters like suing a third party modification-bits maker and a clown car of a court case....it was bad.
Warmachine had profited well from this--a big draw for the game was that it was where competitive players went after becoming sick of 40K. It was a game where playing to win wasn't stigmatised, and balance mistakes were fixed rather than blamed on players approaching the game wrong. (In theory--as mentioned above, tournaments were usually the same handful of busted lists over and over.)
So in 2016, a new edition of Warmachine is announced. And the reception overall seemed....positive, as far as I could tell. Most fans were looking forward to a new edition that would streamline the rules where they needed it, iron out the quirks in the rules and in list selection, and rein in the broken stuff. Even better, PP are talking about dynamic balancing, which is very good new when you had stuff that was almost ubiquitously agreed to be broken through the whole of Mk2 but which PP seemed unwilling to just errata. And there's talk of rules to reward players for using thematic armies, rather than Mk2 Cygnar armies made up almost entirely of mercs.
Then it comes out. And almost immediately, the cracks are showing. Some lowlights of the early Mk3 era:
--Kara Sloan shooting into your deployment zone before you even get to move a model.
--The High Reclaimer with cavalry, and the unstoppable "I resurrect my cavalry basically wherever I want, they all charge your leader" assassination run.
--Baldur and the unkillable, unchargable un-de-buffable Woldwrath that was unstoppably regenerating 4-13 damage per round.
--Caine being able to delete a unit single-handedly, and then teleport behind a forest or building with almost no counterplay.
And some factions were.....in a bad spot. Skorne and Cryx started off in such a weak spot, that the entire Skorne faction would get an entirely new set of rules within a few months.
Then theme forces came out! That'll fix the problem right? Hollow laugh. The "Ghost Fleet" reign of terror lasted almost a year, as a mediocre unit was turned into monsters that were almost unkillable unless you had super specific tech (that not all factions even had access to), while you had to suffer through a miserable game of "all your stuff sucks now". And that was only the first of many.....but theme forces in general made the game staler (a best list for each theme was quickly figured out), harder to get into (each one being a mini-army, with little in common with the others--heaven help you if you just bought a random collection of minis before you figured out the rules), and came out at a horribly uneven pace. Considering that theme forces gave you new army-wide special rules and free stuff that could increase the value of your army by up to 20%, playing out of theme represented a big disadvantage....but not everyone had a choice for quite a while.
But there's dynamic balancing! That'll fix things, right? Kind of? In the short term? Urgh.....okay, Community Integrated Development involved PP releasing beta rules for a new batch of releases, getting fans to play proxy games with them, and sending back data, and iterating on them until these new boys were balanced and ready to go. That sounds like a great idea, right? And it....could have been, maybe.
The first problem was faction fanboyism. People would post biased or skewed (at best) battle reports to argue that Unit X was terribly underpowered or overpowered and needed nerfing / buffing. The lobbying (or at best, confirmation bias) was very real, and the quality of the data suffered. The second problem was power creep. I don't know how much of that was intentional, but it was there. New stuff (especially big, expensive models) were pushed and every CID cycle seemed to result in some horribly unbalanced "the eff did that happen?!" list with no weaknesses and no counterplay that would stomp the meta for a few months until the next big thing came out. It also produced a feeling of instability, like it was impossible to stay on top of the game.
And additionally, speaking from experience here, the game felt more complex than it ever had before. Every army had some unique gimmick that if you didn't know it inside out, gg. It felt like showing up to RPG night and finding that though you're nominally playing the same campaign, we're using GURPS rules. Next week it'll be d20, then FATE..... Along with theme forces adding new rules and new releases promoting power creep and entirely new nonsense you had to prepare for, the burden of memorisation just became worse and worse.
At about the same time, PP seemed committed to tripping over their shoelaces whenever possible.
--The Press Gang (volunteers who promoted the game and participated in a reward scheme) were axed following a lawsuit concerning similar volunteer staff involved with Magic: The Gathering.
--They earned more badwill with a "free riders" policy nominally aimed at helping brick and mortar stores--don't ever come between a gamer and their divine right to order online and then play the local store they're not supporting!
--Remember those big expensive models? Yeah, turns out you can't get them except direct order from PP themselves! That's not a big difference in postage if you're in the US. I'm not in the US. This did lead to one of the local gamers creating a proxy Dracodile from half a toy plastic crocodile, which was hilarious.
--Support for the RPG dried up after two or three sourcebooks.
--They released a skirmish game to compete with Kill Team. No support, sank like a stone.
--There was a massive bungle with a big UK convention that was going to become the official convention of PP in Europe! Except...stuff happened, PP demanded conditions which the convention owner didn't like, and the deal went nowhere. It went from one of the best cons I've been to in 2017 to half-empty in 2018.
--Staff leaving, and the company generally shrinking all round.
--Weird lore decisions (the trollkin have stopped fighting for a homeland, and have just collectively slouched off to IK Africa to fight giant gorillas), and the cessation of mixing in lore with the new rules releases meant the ongoing plot just kind of....stopped. Infernals taking a big stomp across the setting were just the culmination of it all.
It's like they were committed to making every mistake GW had made in the 2010's. Meanwhile, Games Workshop were on the way back up. A new CEO was in place. A new edition of 40K came out that wound in a lot of the nonsense that had choked 6th and 7th edition. Age of Sigmar was picking up steam after a wobbly start. New Necromunda and Blood Bowl, and a new skirmish game in Kill Team / Warhammer Underworlds to provide a lower bar of entry. The big dog was back in town, and things had reversed as many WM players went back to a game that was more friendly to newbies and casual gaming.
So to get back to the point after that long digression....I don't think the Infernals were quite a panic button (the Grymkin release in 2017 was quite clearly building up to it), but it's easy to see why PP might have decided that Warmachine / the Iron Kingdoms just had nowhere left to go, and swept the whole thing off the table. Right now, they're pushing "Warcaster" (WM innnnn spaaaaace), and time will tell how that one fares when it's released.
